The Silence of the Lambs: The Case of Presidency University Now
Brinda Bose “My word’s but a whisper, your deafness a shout” Jethro Tull Some serious questions arise from the imbroglio this month at Presidency University, Calcutta, the latest in a series of rumblings and explosions since the end of last year, this latest gone entirely unreported in newspapers (save one damning article in The Telegraph of May 20th) and on television, and mostly unnoticed even on social media other than on the Facebook pages of some current Presidency students. These are bare squeaks where there should have been a cacophony. A few decades ago, in the(then) Presidency College canteen, there was some gratuitous wall graffiti advice for feeble Bengalis that thundered, “Bangali Gorje Othho” (Bengalis, Rise and Roar) under which, in miniscule print, was inscribed “halum” (“meww”). It elicited ironic laughter, in recognition of the Bengali penchant for believing that their race was tiger-like while more often than not, it was lamb-mewlish. But college and university students have universally always proven that they can rise and roar fearsomely and effectively when the occasion demands it, and the history of Presidency, like many other old institutions, has had more than its fair share of instances of anarchic student rebellion, not least famously the one of the late 1960s and early ‘70s in Bengal. So what has become of the institution today, then, that any sign of student protest arouses either astonishment or disgust or rage or scathing criticism in not only its administration (which is to be expected), but across the range of its faculty, its alumnae and the media in the city, and in fact appears to be able to frighten (or convince) the apathetic or the quiet or the ambitious among its student population as well that dissent is anathema to the building of a savvy, snazzy university of the future? If that is what the new movers and shakers of Presidency University aspire for, to mold it into the IIT-IIM-Private University-Finishing School utilitarian model of higher education, then PU is hurtling toward becoming the first symbolic martyr of the public university in India, even as, ironically enough, it is one of the youngest to join the ranks. The questions, then: How do the ‘new’ builders of ‘old’ public institutions – one sees, for example, a certain reverberation between a Valson Thampu of St Stephens College and the VC’s team at Presidency – envisage their responsibility toward their present and future students? To provide a factory of perfect-branding, each student fitted and kitted for the best results and the best placements, whether in foreign universities for further studies or in high-paying branded jobs? To discipline each student with the most efficient work-ethic, 75% attendance in the best or rottenest of classes, so no questions asked, no voices raised, no time off for walking under torn umbrellas down flooded College Street on a monsoon afternoon or singing rousing, thumping-on-the-canteen-table songs on a hazy winter morning, Romantic poetry in the classroom be damned because one was fleetingly living a poem? To instill in each student the fear of being political, so that to find a voice and to look for a say in the processes one is a part of, to seek a democratic functioning, in which teachers and students can engage in dialogues which are honoured by both when the penny drops, is to be the kind of student the university wishes to drop? To manicure students, batch after batch, who will contribute fruitfully to the market economy, never thinking of breaking out of the molds set for them, where thinking ‘out-of-the-box’ is merely management school jargon for innovative marketing ideas for the next global product and could never be about senior students shouting slogans in the university building portico demanding that those who will come after them be tested for admission rather than be judged on state school board examinations which are unreliable at best? If so, there is no conversation possible between those who are shaping these institutions now and the greatest contemporary thinkers on higher education from around the world or from India – which is not so surprising, perhaps; just impossibly, drearily, depressing. I Hunger Strike as Event – and Non-Event ‘The position I want to advance here is one where we retain the idea of the University as something linked intrinsically to a special kind of mobility or, more precisely, to the possibility that fundamental transformations may occur. The important word here, though, is ‘occurrence’: instead of thinking of the University as site-specific plant or as a place, we might think of it as an ‘event’, as something that happens; and it happens (for one example) where we get the kind of high-stakes vigorous debate about the proper conditions of living and of our living together. The University is an idea, so to speak, first and foremost; but it is not just an abstract idea, divorced from material history: it is indeed something that happens or that takes place, and assumes its place in a social formation. If we are lucky, these happenings become systematic and not episodic; and, if we are luckier still, they are systematic in a specific place, the location of the group of intellectuals that constitutes the action that is a University.’Thomas Docherty, For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution’ (2011) Eerily enough, if you google ‘Presidency University student on hunger strike’ the only links that appear recall a hunger strike by PU students in November 2014(that had 20 students fasting to protest against the debarring of 180 undergraduate students from taking their end-semester examinations because of low attendance in classes.) In the semester just ended, 230 students were debarred from taking their examinations for the same reason, and 1 student, Amardip Singh (not one of them) was on hunger strike for 8 days this month before he collapsed and was hospitalized, to draw attention to this and many other troubles at PU. As the students insist, the hunger strike was not merely for the examination